The whole practice on one screen, reported from the work itself
Most practice reporting is a spreadsheet somebody maintains on a Monday. This is not that. The dashboard is a live read of the jobs, deadlines, reviews and unbilled work your team is already recording — so the number on the screen and the state of the practice cannot drift apart.
Partner, start with the two views in the tour below. Practice manager, go straight to why the Monday spreadsheet keeps lying to you.
- 11 daysRavenscourt Joinery Ltd — CT600 and accountsDue 13/09/2026 · waiting on client since 08/08/2026
- 19 daysHalden Care Homes Ltd — accounts to Companies HouseDue 21/09/2026 · with reviewer, no movement for 9 days
- 30 SepPemberton Logistics Ltd — VAT return, quarter to 31/08Records received, not started
nobody assembled this. Every row is a job the practice already has open
The same practice, seen from two chairs
A practice manager opens FigsFlow and sees what is at risk this week and who is holding it up. A partner opens the same system and sees the shape of the year — where the practice is over capacity, what has been done and not billed, and which service lines are absorbing more than they were priced for. Switch between the two, then move through the sections.
| Client and job | Deadline | Held by | Blocked on | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ravenscourt Joinery LtdCT600 and statutory accounts | 13/09/2026 | Priya Raman | Client · bank statements | 11 days |
| Halden Care Homes LtdAccounts to Companies House | 21/09/2026 | David Ellison | Review · 9 days idle | 19 days |
| Whitfield Consulting LtdConfirmation statement | 28/09/2026 | Amara Boateng | Nothing | On track |
| Pemberton Logistics LtdVAT return, quarter to 31/08 | 07/10/2026 | Unassigned | Owner · not allocated | No owner |
| Ashgrove Trading LtdSelf Assessment · two directors | 31/01/2027 | Priya Raman | Client · records | Early |
| Client | Obligation | Statutory date | Internal target | Runway |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ravenscourt Joinery Ltd | CT600 and accounts | 13/09/2026 | 30/08/2026 | Target passed |
| Halden Care Homes Ltd | Accounts to Companies House | 21/09/2026 | 07/09/2026 | 5 days |
| Pemberton Logistics Ltd | VAT return, quarter to 31/08 | 07/10/2026 | 25/09/2026 | No owner |
| Whitfield Consulting Ltd | Confirmation statement | 28/09/2026 | 19/09/2026 | 17 days |
| Ashgrove Trading Ltd | Self Assessment · 2 directors | 31/01/2027 | 30/11/2026 | 89 days |
| Reviewer | Waiting | Oldest | Avg wait | Load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| David EllisonPartner | 9 | 9 days | 6.1 days | |
| Sarah HartPartner | 3 | 3 days | 2.4 days | |
| Amara BoatengManager | 2 | 2 days | 1.8 days |
| Person | Available | Committed | Load | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priya RamanSenior | 35.0 hrs | 43.5 hrs | 124% | |
| David EllisonPartner · review | 22.0 hrs | 26.0 hrs | 118% | |
| Amara BoatengManager | 35.0 hrs | 31.5 hrs | 90% | |
| Tom WhitcombeSemi-senior | 35.0 hrs | 21.0 hrs | 60% | |
| Nadia FarooqBookkeeper | 28.0 hrs | 25.2 hrs | 90% |
| Job | Recorded | Agreed fee | Aged | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marren AdvisoryAdvisory · retainer | £8,140 | £5,000 | 71 days | 163% of fee |
| Halden Care Homes LtdAccounts and CT600 | £6,320 | £5,750 | 34 days | 110% of fee |
| Ravenscourt Joinery LtdAccounts and CT600 | £3,900 | £3,900 | 12 days | Ready to bill |
| Ashgrove Trading LtdMonthly bookkeeping | £1,610 | £2,100 | 9 days | In progress |
Illustrative sample data. Reassigning a job, clearing a review and raising an invoice run in the live demo rather than here.
Every practice already has a dashboard. It is a spreadsheet, and it is wrong by Tuesday.
Somebody spends an hour on Monday morning pulling a list together. Jobs from the workflow tool, filing dates from the tax software, a column for who is doing what, and a RAG rating typed in by hand. It goes on the wall of the Monday meeting and everyone agrees it is useful.
By Tuesday afternoon three of those jobs have moved, one client has sent the records everybody was chasing, and a fourth job has been quietly reassigned because someone is off. Nobody updates the sheet, because updating the sheet is not anybody’s job. The following Monday, the same hour is spent rebuilding it.
The cost is not the hour. It is that the practice makes decisions from a picture that is four days old — and the things that go wrong are precisely the things that changed after the picture was taken.
Reporting is not a stage. It is a read of the stages.
This is what makes it practice management rather than a business intelligence tool pointed at an accountancy firm. The dashboard has no data of its own. Every figure on it is a live read of the engagement, the job, the allocation and the recorded time — which is the only reason it can be right on a Wednesday without anyone touching it.
- 01
The service is agreed
The engagement letter says what the practice is doing this year — which is what creates the obligations to track.
- 02
The dates are set
Year end, VAT stagger and payroll frequency produce the filing dates, and the template produces the internal ones.
- 03
The work is allocated
Jobs, steps and owners. Every stage change is recorded as it happens rather than reported afterwards.
- YOU ARE HERE04
Practice dashboard
One live read across all of it — risk, bottleneck, capacity and unbilled work, with no assembly step.
This page - 05
The decision
Reallocate the week, chase the client, clear the review, raise the invoice. Acting starts where the number is.
- Job stage and owner — from the workflow, so “waiting on client” is a state rather than a note in a column
- Statutory and internal dates — from the client record and the workflow template
- Allocation and availability — committed hours against working hours, per person
- Recorded time against the agreed fee — from timesheets and billing
- Reallocate before the week starts — while it is a decision rather than overtime
- Break the review bottleneck — because you can see which reviewer everything is behind
- Chase the right client this morning — the blocked-on column, not the whole list
- Bill the work that is finished — nine ready-to-bill jobs is a billing run, not a report
Four questions, and nothing else on the screen
A dashboard that answers thirty questions answers none of them, because nobody reads past the third tile. These are the four a partner or practice manager actually opens the week with — and each one is a question you can act on the same morning.
What is going to be late?
Not what is due — what is going to be late. An obligation with three weeks left and no owner is at more risk than one due Friday that is finished and waiting on a signature.
Where has it stopped?
Usually the review stage, and usually behind one person. Time-in-stage makes the bottleneck a number instead of a suspicion everybody has but nobody says at the meeting.
Who runs out of week first?
Committed hours against available hours, a week or two ahead. Seen early it is a reallocation; seen on Friday it is overtime, and overtime is where write-offs come from.
What have we done and not billed?
Work that has cleared review and not become an invoice. From a distance an unbilled month and a slow billing run look identical — separating them is worth a fortnight of cash.
The statutory date is not the deadline your practice actually works to
A CT600 is due nine months and a day after the year end. That is the date HMRC cares about. The date the practice needs is the one by which the work has to be with a reviewer for the filing date to be comfortable — and that internal target is what the dashboard measures against.
Filed on time is the outcome. Started in time is the thing you can still change.
The work is not slow. The queue in front of one person is.
Ask a practice where the delays are and you will be told preparation, or clients, or the software. Measure time-in-stage and the answer is usually the review step — because it is the only stage where the constraint is a specific human being, and the only one nobody has ever counted.
Four days of average wait is two working weeks a year, per job, spent in a queue. The twenty-one percent send-back rate is the more interesting number: it suggests the review step is catching things that could have been caught earlier, which is a workflow question rather than a reviewer question.
| Reviewer | Waiting | Oldest | Average wait | Share of queue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| David EllisonPartner · all statutory accounts | 9 jobs | 9 days | 6.1 days | 64% |
| Sarah HartPartner · tax | 3 jobs | 3 days | 2.4 days | 21% |
| Amara BoatengManager · bookkeeping and VAT | 2 jobs | 2 days | 1.8 days | 15% |
Who runs out of week first
Committed hours against available hours, per person, a week or two ahead. It is built from the jobs already allocated and the working pattern already recorded — not from anyone’s sense of how busy they feel, which is the least reliable instrument in any practice.
The value is entirely in the timing. The same information on Friday afternoon is a description of a problem.
The same view runs by team and by service line, which is usually how a practice discovers that one service is quietly consuming a third of its senior time.
The parts you will actually use every week
Short list, honestly labelled
The dashboard is a read of FigsFlow’s own records, so it has fewer moving parts than most of the platform. Everything on the right is what it cannot see today — because finding that out in month two is worse than reading it now.
The rest of FigsFlow
The strongest connection is the one you never configure. Engagements, jobs, deadlines, allocations and recorded time are already the same record, which is the only reason the dashboard can be current without anybody maintaining it.
- ENGAGEMENT LETTERS
- JOBS & DEADLINES
- TEAM & CAPACITY
- TIMESHEETS & BILLING
Microsoft 365
Staff sign in with the identity your practice already administers, and what each person can see on the dashboard follows the role they already have. Supporting documents stay in your own SharePoint tenant under your retention policy.
- ENTRA ID SSO
- MFA
- SHAREPOINT — YOUR TENANT
- ROLE-BASED VISIBILITY
Companies House
Company data and filing dates are read from the public register, so accounts and confirmation statement deadlines are derived rather than typed in by somebody at onboarding.
- FILING DATES
- COMPANY DETAILS
Tax and accounts production software
No integration with TaxCalc, IRIS, Taxfiler, CCH or the rest. If a return is prepared and filed entirely inside your tax software, the dashboard knows the job’s stage in FigsFlow but not what is happening inside that package.
Not in this releaseLedger data from Xero or QuickBooks
The dashboard reports on the practice’s own work, not on client bookkeeping. It will not tell you which clients have unreconciled bank lines.
Not in this releaseCustom dashboards and report builder
The views are fixed. You cannot build your own tiles, and there is no drag-and-drop layout. That is a deliberate choice for now, but treat it as a limitation rather than a philosophy if you need bespoke reporting.
On the roadmap — no committed dateScheduled email digests
The dashboard is somewhere you go rather than something that arrives in your inbox on a Monday morning.
On the roadmap — no committed dateThree practices, three different reasons to look
Sole practitioners are often told they do not need a dashboard because they can hold the practice in their head. That is true right up to the week they cannot — and the week they cannot is usually January.
You are the bottleneck, and you know it
Nothing here tells you something you could not work out. What it does is remove the working out — so the thirty seconds you have between calls is spent deciding rather than remembering.
The size where the Monday spreadsheet appears
Too many jobs to hold in one head, not enough to justify a full-time practice manager. This is the size the dashboard is aimed at, because it is the size where the copying starts.
January, seen from more than one desk
Self Assessment season with several partners and a shared review pool. The useful question stops being “how are we doing” and becomes “whose queue is everything stuck behind this week”.
The awkward dashboard questions, answered
What the practice dashboard reads from
Jobs, tasks and deadlines
The stages every figure on the dashboard is a read of.
JOBS AND DEADLINESHMRC deadlines
Where the statutory and internal dates come from.
HMRC DEADLINESTeam and capacity
The allocations behind the capacity view.
TEAM AND CAPACITYTimesheets and billing
Where recorded time and the agreed fee meet.
TIMESHEETS AND BILLINGWorkflow templates
Where stages and internal target dates are defined.
WORKFLOW TEMPLATESCompanies House
Where company filing dates are read from.
COMPANIES HOUSEBring the spreadsheet you rebuild every Monday
Thirty minutes on the practice dashboard, run by someone who has used it inside a working practice. Bring the sheet you maintain by hand and we will show you which of its columns the system already knows — and which of them you were right to keep.